If you don’t mind me repurposing a post I made to the FaceBook “MENSA” group… the question that had been posed was “how can I view people as intelligent if they’re referring to ‘God’ every five minutes?” and following a slew of mostly atheist replies I entered the following:
Not all theistic people find it necessary to refer to god every 5 minutes. If we focus on those that do, I suspect the population we’ve thus isolated consists primarily of those who find illusory comfort in the promise of absolute certainty, which absolves them of having to think on certain matters or in certain problematic topic areas (mostly pertaining to human interaction, although issues such as one’s own mortality or summing up the overall experience of life may also fall into this zone). Conversing with anyone in a topic area where they’ve opted to not think is going to convey the impression of scant intelligence.
But most people turn to prepackaged theistic solutions and promises not because they’re fundamentally stupid, but because modern life is complex and for most people difficult to sort out. I had the distinct impression between the ages of 15 and 20 that most folks of my cohort stopped assuming that they’d figure out the adult stuff by the time they were adults, got nervous about how little made sense, and stopped trying and instead looked around and began to copycat anyone who seemed to be doing relatively well… and hoped nobody noticed that they were an imposter, a fake grownup who had no clue what they were doing.
When you’re in that state of mind, it’s pretty easy to sell you on a bag of plastic answers.
Keep in mind that less than 500 years ago you could mostly look around and understand human endeavors and motivations, tools and processes, mores and morals, even if a lot of it wasn’t healthy and a lot of the big-scale stuff remained mysterious. Back off to 10,000 years and life mostly consisted of picking or digging up what was growing, chasing down a tasty critter now and then, and dealing with the aggressive animals that viewed you as a tasty critter. But fast forward again to the present and vast swaths of how human experience is set up are “black boxes”, processes that are far from self-explanatory and where most of us shrug and participate with only superficial understanding; and where options and alternatives are myriad but clarity about how to choose or how to proceed is considerably less available.
When you grow up in a world dominated by the prepackaged McReligion institutions, it’s easy to conclude that the entire body of theistic thought exists only as “opiate of the masses” or “pablum for stupid people” or “get rick quick schemes for jim bakker types”.
But let’s look at it from the other vantage point. In a world where there were some topic areas that didn’t easily yield themselves to understanding — and, I might add, a world without a formalized scientific method as of yet — there would be a few people who for whatever reason were inclined to ponder these things. For most of human history they didn’t come back with an array of experiments and resultant data but now and then they had insights about human behavior or life choices or how a government and its officials ought to behave. Some of which was empty of useful content but some of which people found helpful, and hence a social role and social notion arose for these odd people and their odd social contributions.
Note the presence in that list of potential criticism of the government. It should not be difficult to connect the dots and see that it might be useful to the governor to have an Official State Religion to point to and tell the people “don’t go listening to these charlatans with their ideas, we already have a holy man and a temple and they have Right Answers”. But that is a response to the original not-so-prepackaged version, yes?
Dub in the renaissance and modern scientific method and we’ve got positivist science and highly compelling results, but scientific method doesn’t answer the human interaction stuff, the choices stuff, the meaning of life stuff. Not every human concern yielded itself to the methodology that put human footprints on the moon. Doesn’t mean any blithering idiot who claims to be bearing the word of god should be embraced as a visionary, but it sheds some light on why a thinking person might be theistic, or at least to be a ponderer of these questions that don’t have easy answers.
ETA: I have no idea why that first ¶ is all boldface, I didn’t format it that way
